Sean Keating was one of the more significant painters in the formative years of the Irish Free State. He was born in Limerick in 1889, where he enrolled in the Technical School to study art, moving subsequently to the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, where he became a student of William Orpen. Keating’s work initially … Read more
On the fourth and last day of his trial, in an exchange in court between the Attorney-General, Sir F.E. Smith—leading the prosecution—and the Chief Justice, reference was made for the first time to ‘Casement’s diary’. When rumours began to percolate among newspapers, politicians, ambassadors and gentlemen’s clubs in July 1916 about Roger Casement’s ‘sexual degeneracy’ … Read more
To find the title Hibernia im Ruhrgebiet (Ireland in the Ruhr) on a ninth-century map of ecclesiastical centres would cause little or no surprise. To find the title on a nineteenth-century map of successful mining enterprises is altogether more unexpected. In Britain and Industrial Europe 1750-1870 W.O. Henderson opens his chapter on the Ruhr with … Read more
By 1795, the United Irishmen’s hope of bringing about change in Ireland by peaceful means had been shattered once and for all. French assistance to an Irish independence movement seemed to be the only way out of the vicious circle of growing popular radicalisation and government counter measures. Revolutionary France had already developed into a … Read more
When the bankrupt dandy Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau arrived in 1828 more or less by coincidence, his mind was a clean slate with regard to Ireland. He was appalled by the squalor he saw. ‘The dirt, poverty and ragged dress of the common man’, he exclaimed, ‘is beyond belief!’ Of the city of Galway he … Read more